Everything to do with phonetics. Please note: comments not signed with your genuine name may be removed.

Thursday, 13 August 2009

fonts by George Douros

Ubbo Wiersema wrote to draw my attention to some new free fonts designed by George Douros. (See here.)

Ubbo was most excited by the fact that one of the fonts, Aegyptus, encodes over seven thousand hieroglyphs. If you’ve always wanted to word-process Egyptian hieroglyphs, as he has, now you can. Download the fonts here.

Those of us interested in phonetics, on the other hand, will be interested to inspect the font named (rather confusingly) Unicode Symbols, in which the phonetic symbols are to be found.

I’m afraid, though, that we’re in for a disappointment. The ʊ symbol appears wrongly as a kind of curly v. Worse, the Spacing Modifier Letters range is almost entirely absent: this means that among other things the font has no stress marks and no length mark. So no serious phonetician will be satisfied with this font.If only font designers like Mr Douros would consult phoneticians!

9 comments:

Oh, gods. Mr Douros has built "Unicode" fonts for Egyptian using preliminary draft proposals I authored years ago. We did recently encode over 900 Middle Egyptian characters based on Gardiner's set. Mr Douros' 7000-glyph set is not standard, and he should not be using the term "Unicode".